Mixing Heart of Agile and VUCA Prime to enable Business Agility

10 min readOct 5, 2019

Hi folks! What’s up? I hope you’re doing good.

In this blog, you’ll see how you can use both Heart of Agile and VUCA Prime core values and principles to enable Business Agility. I’ll begin explaining the basics of Business Agility. Next, I’ll come up with Heart of Agile and show you how simple and powerful it is. Then, I’ll talk about the VUCA Prime framework and its importance to our current way of life. Finally, you’ll see how those three concepts are deeply connected as they get wrapped into some behaviors, practices, and tools.

Before we start, a disclaimer: I write based on what I’ve learned and lived; therefore, it’s my point of view. Feel free to disagree, and we shall discuss different perspectives.

The basics of Business Agility

Both Scrum.org [1] and AgileBusiness.org [2] define Business Agility as the ability of an organization to adapt itself quickly. This adaptation may flow from traditional, functional, internal silos with too much power at the top of the pyramid to internal end-to-end value delivery teams with a flat hierarchy and high level of collaboration. It also may flow as in responding rapidly to market changes and customer needs without compromising the quality of your product or service. Hence, whether internal or external, Agility flows through the business so that it can survive and thrive.

Another exciting and critical approach comes from Dr. Klaus Leopold, a respected computer scientist, and Kanban pioneer: Business Agility is not about having many agile teams, but about having agile interactions connecting them [3]. This approach warns us to pay more attention to the means, instead of transforming only the parts.

***Image 1: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing to Do with Business Agility***

Moreover, why is it necessary to enable Agility in businesses?

Well, why have we talked so much about transformation in recent years? Why do we need to change, to innovate, to disrupt? Why are we continually seeking these things? Simple answer, fellows: because changing and adapting it’s a matter of organizational, professional, and personal survival. If we are not trying to find a way to “kill” our current way of thinking, working, and solving problems, make sure that there is someone else doing it for us.

The challenge is all about delivering more value to our customers and being able to do this in a fast, flexible, collaborative, viable, profitable, friendly way. Acting this way should grant a company good outcomes, satisfied customers, and happy employees!

So, now that we know the basics of Business Agility and why it’s crucial to enable something like that in our teams and companies, we can begin exploring some manners of how we can do it.

Heart of Agile: simple and powerful

Dr. Alistair Cockburn, one of the signatories of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development [4] (a.k.a. Agile Manifesto), came up with what he called a reminder of what’s essential. Heart of Agile is this. A group of four words around a heart picture that represents a radically simpler approach to achieve outstanding outcomes [5], according to Dr. Cockburn, and not only in the software development process but in everything that needs work done.

Master the Basics

If you do only these four things (Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve) over and over, you should see evolution in your work and your deliveries because you’re doing the essential, practicing, and mastering the basics of Agility.

However, despite having only four words that are as simple and direct as they seem, Heart of Agile also gives you the freedom to expand these concepts. From this starting point, many powerful ways towards Business Agility may rise.

VUCA Prime

Have you heard of General Stanley McChrystal? He is a retired US military and author of several books, including Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (2015) [6]. In the year of 2004, he took the arduous mission of neutralizing al Qaeda during the Iraq war. Quickly, he realized that the army could not handle a network of small cells that attacked fast and mercilessly, and then hid among the population (for camouflage and protection). Although more massive and more powerful, the Allied Forces were no match for al Qaeda terrorists simply because their extremely vertical structure was neither fast nor flexible enough as their foes were.

The General then broke a big paradigm and began to transform the army structure under his command into a team network that combined:

Transparency;
Continuous flow of communication;
Autonomy;
Trust for decision making.

The silos were torn down. Team-Best practices were analyzed and quickly disseminated to the rest of the teams. The change in the organizational model — from vertical, inflexible, and decision-making in the hands of a few — to a “team of teams” was the key to defeating al Qaeda. The image below gives us a good idea about what they did:

*Image 3: Changing from a command structure to a team of teams structure* [7]

Here comes the VUCA world

General McChrystal had to do what he did because he was in a VUCA scenario. VUCA is an acronym first used more than 30 years ago [8] to describe the world’s new behavior back then. In the late 1990s, it began to be more discussed, mainly on military education. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Let’s see its details:

Volatility

The amount and speed of changes nowadays make it very difficult to predict scenarios as was done long ago. However, these occurrences are not necessarily hard to understand (knowledge about it is often available). The main problem here is the lack of stability and the sudden turn of events (e.g., surprise attacks that General McChrystal and his troops suffered along with their campaign).

Uncertainty

Low understanding of issues and events due to insufficient information; therefore, the lack of predictability. For instance, the difficulty in gathering (useful) information about the terrorists by merely asking or interrogating the locals since al Qaeda hid among the population.

Complexity

The issue or event has many interconnected pieces (e.g., high coupling in software engineering). Information is partially available or predictable, but the volume or nature of it can be overwhelming to process. For example, what would be the consequences of attacking a village that conceals an important terrorist leader? What would happen if innocent people also get hit or killed by the Allied forces? What would be the possible diplomatic incidents triggered by this situation?

Ambiguity

While Uncertainty stands for ‘lack of predictability’ because there’s not enough information, in Ambiguity, you can have enough information, but their causal relationships are entirely unclear. There’s a lack of understanding of precisely what the situation is. Look at the army’s position in the war: they didn’t get help from the population, which also suffer because of al Qaeda. However, why they didn’t get help exactly? Because people didn’t like them? Because people were too afraid of the terrorists’ retaliation? Both reasons? None of them?

Well, despite VUCA is an old thing, this is still our reality. We try to keep up with scenarios and problems that change all the time; we find multiple causes for our problems, instead of one single root cause; and we make decisions that always come with some level of trade-off, which often leaves us mere mortals to choose the one with the least impact on our projects or businesses. It is almost as if we are sailing in rough seas without clear directions and with minimum aid of navigation devices. We always want to get to a safe port or beach (a.k.a. solving the problems), but we also want to do this in the less harmful way we can.

With that in mind, Bob Johansen, former president of the Institute For The Future (IFTF), released a new concept about this turbulent world. He called it the VUCA Prime Framework [12]. These are the skills/attributes we must develop, incorporate, encourage, and disseminate to our teams, peers, and leaders so that we can reduce the paralyzing effects of VUCA.

Vision can fight Volatility

When we have a clear purpose and well-defined goals, we know why we are doing something and what are the main criteria to be successful. Hence, the conditions do not affect us much. We’d probably recover faster and less damaged than we should if we were clueless about the vision.

Understanding can fight Uncertainty

Everyone should understand the business vision, their role in the team, and what’s their contribution to success. Values, strategies, and metrics should flow in a dynamically way across teams. It is vital to promote constant communication and active listening to give and receive an understanding of things.

Clarity can fight Complexity

We usually get Clarity by making things simple without being simplistic. It involves bringing stuff to surface, understanding, and prioritizing. For example, identifying all the actors involved in a complex situation, what are their problems and goals, if they have causal relations, and so forth.

Agility can fight Ambiguity

We fight Ambiguity identifying some assumptions and hypotheses, then validating them. It requires processes that allow us to experiment, fail, learn fast, build, test, measure, learn again, and improve. So, it’s about Agility.

Wrapping up

So, let’s try to wrap it all up! Here is a list of behaviors, practices, and tools that I consider of most relevance:

Be honest and transparent all the time, with all people: Boys and girls, this is one of the basics. Don’t go the other way. Being fair and square help you to collaborate more with anyone, deliver better products, reflect on the right things and improve more quickly;

Keep communication flowing, and its channels open for all: Another one of the basics. Communication is the mother of all interactions, and we saw earlier what Business Agility was all about, according to Dr. Klaus Leopold. So, don’t let internal and external communication fall behind;

*Image 5: The Golden Circle using Apple as an example* [14]

It bothers people sometimes, but always Start With Why [13]: In his book, Simon Sinek says people are more inspired by a sense of purpose (Why) than things like “How” and “What.” From “Why” comes the most potent attributes for any vision you can build. You can also identify the real root causes of a problem, therefore making a better analysis, prioritization, development, and delivery when searching why people want you to put some random, senseless solution into your backlog.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) [15]: You’ve probably heard of OKRs by now. It is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes [16]. In it, we set goals for a shorter period, and Key Results are usually reported weekly, allowing a team to overcome Volatility whenever it shows up;

Product Vision Statement (PVS) [17]: According to ProductPlan.com, PVS is a “clear, concise description of a company’s long-term aspirational goal for its product. It serves as a guide and reminder to all involved in a product’s development”. They give us a good template for it:

For our [target customer], who needs to [customer’s need], our [product] is a [product category or description] that [unique benefits and selling points]. Unlike [competitors or current methods], our product has [main differentiators].

Product Roadmap: a powerful tool that can be used to show stakeholders and teams the Product Vision in terms of features along the time. Having a Roadmap helps you to reflect regularly and adapt whenever is necessary;

Make work visible, and all policies explicit: These are Kanban principles [18]. You may not even use Kanban, but I suggest you give a quick look at its Values and Principles, for they are strong allies to Business Agility;

Blameless Post Incident Reviews (PIRs) [19]: Another great way to practice Reflect and Improve from the Heart of Agile. PIRs focus on discovering the root causes of a problem (system issues), not who was involved (human error). It correlates with both Understanding/Clarity from VUCA Prime and DevOps culture;

Metrics and Charts: To a team Reflect and Improve, there must be metrics and charts involved and visible. Lead Time, Throughput, CFD, Cycle Time, Mean Time to Detect, Mean Time to Restore, Change Fail Rate… whatever is necessary, but without being too much. Also, remember to measure the Outcomes. Don’t focus only on the Output.

Conclusion

As we saw, you can enable Business Agility through many ways, possibilities, and variations. This blog’s purpose was to show some of them to you. However, it’s crucial to take into consideration that you must seek to master the basics of Agility (Collaborate. Deliver. Reflect. Improve); and always remember to fight VUCA effects (Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity. Ambiguity) with VUCA Prime (Vision. Understanding. Clarity. Agility).

Well, I hope you enjoyed it! See you next time.

References

[1] https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/business-agility

[2] https://www.agilebusiness.org/page/WhatisBusinessAgility#pulse

[3]: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/agile-transformation-business-agility/

[4]: https://agilemanifesto.org/

[5] https://heartofagile.com/

[6]: McChrystal, Chris, and Tantum Collins. 2015. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

[7]: Gordon, B., 2017. Key takeaways from Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal. https://medium.com/@beaugordon/key-takeaways-from-team-of-teams-by-general-stanley-mcchrystal-eac0b37520b9

[8]: http://usawc.libanswers.com/faq/84869

[9]: http://execdev.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/blog/the-origins-of-vuca

[10]: https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you